| merely scribble “finis” and let it go at that? Or does one merely keep silent and thus let it be understood that everything is all over. This would have been the easiest thing to do… just like running away and hiding and refusing to face facts. It would have been very cowardly too. I think what we have or had, deserves something better than that. It is so hard to give you up without a struggle which I suspect you are ready to do. The years go by, people change and the things they want are different. I wish I could just keep on feeling the same old way, happy to compromise, blind to almost everything except to be with you, to love you and have you love me, to be content after some fashion. But things have changed. I feel I must keep faith with myself. I have reached a bridge and it has to be crossed. I am no longer contented with just knowing you love me and being with you now and then. I want more. I want to have the right to be with you for always, to have security and peace and happiness. You need me too. You will be needing more as time goes on, when there will be no more countries to save, no more wars to be won, no more troubles to shoot. Without us together, your life will just be one long, continuous work—empty in the end. There won’t be |
sunken ships: “There were sterns pointing straight up to the sky out of the water, hulls side up looking like elephants submerged and taking baths, just sticks of masts above the water, and some twisted and buckled rusty plates like reddish warts above the water where ships had been blown apart.” Lansdale made the trip to a U.S. Army camp outside Manila aboard a crowded troop train. He and the other soldiers were packed like cattle into cars that were normally used to transport sugarcane. As the train chugged along at 15 mph, someone “started ‘moo-ing’ like a lonely cow and the moo-ing was taken up all along the line.” From the “trainload of moos,” Lansdale could see that the “strikingly beautiful” countryside had not been affected by war to the same extent as the harbor. He saw “palm huts on stilts with vivid green banana fronds making a border for a blue, blue sky marbled with towering fluffs of cumulus clouds, and before this background of sky and hut and fronds was spread a rice paddy intersticed with small raised dikes and the green rice sprouts making a staccato vertical pattern broken by big old water buffalo plodding along, with a copper skinned old man, all bent, straw big brimmed coolie hat on his head, following after.” When the train reached Manila, such bucolic scenes were replaced by further reminders of the legacy of conflict. “Stone walls along the roads were gouged and holed,” Lansdale wrote, “tall apartment |
